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"Economist Robert B. Reich, in his 1991 book The Work of Nations, stated that in the United States, the number of private security guards and officers was comparable to the number of publicly paid police officers. He used this phenomenon as an example of the general withdrawal of the affluent from existing communities where governments provide public services.

Instead, the wealthy pay to provide their own premium services, through voluntary, exclusive associations. As taxpayer resistance has l

Did you actually read the document (especially the part about narrowly-crafted subpoenas and court orders)?

I'm not clear who you're accusing of not reading. Because there's nothing about warrants in the article and this was in the comments.

Sprint/Nextel is being picked on here ofr its automated web portal that allows agencies to extract all manner of data without FISA court warrants or any other oversight
Part of the issue here is they're selling this data to law enforcement in the absence of any wa

Good point. Maybe you should have linked to regulatory capture [wikipedia.org] so the mods would have a clue what you were talking about. We know the telecoms and government are in each others pockets, but Yahoo?

If we allow corporations as legal persons they should be subject to dissolution for certain abuses. That should satisfy both pro-civil rights liberals and pro-death penalty conservatives.

Good point. Maybe you should have linked to regulatory capture so the mods would have a clue what you were talking about.

heh, yeah, the Rockefeller mods are out in force today. I suppose it is too much to expect a basic knowledge about the history of Standard Oil.

Rockefeller n. - See Robber Baron.

We know the telecoms and government are in each others pockets, but Yahoo?

Once a corporation goes public and is involved in significant M&A they're at the government's mercy. The TARP scandal has brought out just how strongly the screws get put on.

If we allow corporations as legal persons they should be subject to dissolution for certain abuses. That should satisfy both pro-civil rights liberals and pro-death penalty conservatives.

Sure, any corporate charter can be suspended or revoked. It just never happens, except very minimally at the local levels.

SEC could be the poster boys for regulatory capture given the way bad management has plundered shareholder's money. Look at what happened with all those companies and who went to jail? Martha Stewart. Give me a break.

If we allow corporations as legal persons they should be subject to dissolution for certain abuses.

This is an extremely important point, especially in the US right now. Our Supreme Court is arguing whether a corporation can give unlimited amounts of money to a political candidate. The argument is that if a corporation is considered to be a person, and holds all the rights of a person, then that should include the right of free speech, and money equals speech, so therefore they should be allowed to give unlimited funds to a candidate. Forget for a moment the amount of logical acrobatics required to accept that argument, what it comes down to is that the corporations have the money, thus they must be allowed to have all the power. Any chance of separating corporate wealth from political power hinges on this decision by the Supreme Court. If it finds for the corporations, there will never be another official elected on a national level that does not hold the interests of one or more corporations above the interests of the people or the Nation.

Unfortunately, the broad range of civil rights granted to corporations-as-persons does not come with the same responsibilities, both moral and legal, that are required of the flesh-and-blood type of persons. For example, we are brought up in the US to believe there is great shame in declaring bankruptcy, and that anyone who walks away from a mortgage that is "upside-down" or "under water" should be branded with the sign of shame. Yet, in the corporate world, bankruptcy and default are common, an accepted part of doing business. It is not only acceptable for a corporation whose liabilities outweigh its assets to default on its obligations, but it is considered "the right thing to do" to preserve capital. No shame, no harm, no foul. A company that has defaulted can "reorganize" and come back as if nothing has happened. But if someone who owes half a million dollars on a house that's worth $200k and drops the keys in the mailbox and walks away must be shunned and receive no help, lest it create a "moral hazard" (yes, that's the term the actually use).

The fiction that a corporation deserves all the rights as a person, or should even be considered a person in any legal sense at all, is one that will continue to damage the future of the US, perhaps permanently. The problem is, the only people who could possibly stop this insanity, are funded primarily by corporate dollars. It appears to be an intractable, maybe fatal flaw in our system.

That's because you see it as a system, rather than choice, what we choose to do, what we collectively decide society should be. All power is lost at that moment we accept that as truth, and people become passive victims of the sharks that know how to exploit any system.

It's not sustainable for the longer term though. Either your country goes bankrupt, or faces similar fates in the hand of the criminal lyers that have held you in chains for so l

Never mind the multitude of corporations responsible for the manufacturing of your computer... Or the ones running your network connection... Nope, don't need corporations at all. Build everything with my own two hands from scratch!

Never mind the multitude of corporations responsible for the manufacturing of your computer... Or the ones running your network connection... Nope, don't need corporations at all. Build everything with my own two hands from scratch!

We need division of labor in order to have a decent quality of life. We do not, however, need incorporation to confer the benefits of personhood (e.g. free speech, bankruptcy) without the responsibilities of personhood (e.g. criminal culpability).

I always feel think "wow, this guy's kids must be miserable" when I read all these crazy anti-capitalist/anarchist style posts on/. then I remember most are virgins still trying to look cool enough to maybe get some sloppy from that cool goth slut they admire so much.

I've gone from six figures to zero and back again. Living on rice and beans and stealing wood for the fireplace is not really as enjoyable as driving my Corvette around or playing games on my i7.

Of course the government does not qualify. The people who run our government are not supposed to be professional politicians or professional bureaucrats. The whole point of the American experiment was a government by, of and for the people, not one full of a ruling class of "professionals".

Why do the anti-government tools never blink at the notion of governance by corporations or the rich?

Yeah. Forget about it. It's impossible to verify. That doesn't make impossible to sell to the nearest sucker though.

Not true. If it wasn't owned by Yahoo, they'd have no standing to send a DMCA takedown letter.

Which is not to say it's the most recent version of the document, or that it's actually the one they use (rather than an early draft before some zeroes were added), but you can be fairly confident it is a Yahoo document.

People will use whatever's free, and probably say they have "nothing to hide!" The truly paranoid (which I say without intending any negative connotation) will run their own services. Unfortunately 90% of the email addresses you communicate with probably end in gmail.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com anyway. That data is available on the other end, if in much more fragmented format.

I agree with your idea, but I honestly don't think the masses will go for it. If enough concerned people do, it could be worthwhi

1. The government is run by humans, which almost by the definition of the word are inherently fallible.2. The government, also by definition, has the power to disrupt your life/put you in jail/confiscate your goods,3. The above two combine to form a chilling effect upon your rights being exercised as you see fit.4. Just as with quantum mechanics, the government cannot snoop without causing side effects in what they're snooping on.

So plenty of people have a darn good reason to not want government nosiness even IF they are not breaking the law.

But this "search warrant" give you a lot more than just Mr. John Doe at some street.. It gives you all the Doe's at a specific month who visited some URL. That is freaking privacy intrusion. Goodbye Yahoo.

But this "search warrant" give you a lot more than just Mr. John Doe at some street.. It gives you all the Doe's at a specific month who visited some URL. That is freaking privacy intrusion. Goodbye Yahoo.

Who exactly were you planning on using for email or IM that will ignore a subpoena from law enforcement? What good will it do you unless everyone you communicate with also uses such a provider? What about your connection to that provider?

If you become interesting to law enforcement, you're living in another world if you think they won't consider it worthy of further investigation that so many connections from your ISP are to an email provider (or, if paranoid a VPN endpoint) in another country known to be

You can always use a "me-ternet" It's not exactly rocket surgery to set up your own mail server. Although I do wonder why there aren't more cheap router-type appliances for home use. How different is routing mail from routing packets, really?

If the government suspects that a URL is being used to do illicit communications, how else do you expect them to figure out who was trying to get the message? Particularly if they're clever enough that rather than having an URL of someserver.com/alqaida/people_we_will_kill.html, they've used steganography to embed the information in an otherwise harmless looking file?

The question is not whether such search warrants have been granted, it's

Do you see that "National Security Letters" part? That's for the Patriot Act, which requires no court order whatsoeve and for which revealing to anyone that you've received such a notice is illegal. There is, so far, no required judicial oversight for such orders: it's an amazing loophole for unscrupulous federal agencies, including those which have no business in domestic investigations such as the NSA, to use. And since companies such as AT&T have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to cooperate with law enforcement in secret, warrant-free wiretaps with their whistleblower exposed secret fiber-optic taps on core network trunks, rest assured that you have _no_ way of assuring that these monitoring tools haven't been misued.

It's nice to see the pricelist, though, so we have an idea of just how cheap and easy and wholesale such orders are.

The really interesting part about National Security Letters is that they're fairly obviously unconsitutional, but were designed in such a way that the judiciary would never rule on their constitutionality. By making it a crime to reveal that you've received an NSL, you make it impossible for anyone to demonstrate that it existed in the first place, and thus prevent anyone who was targeted by them to establish standing to sue. So if someone tries to challenge it, the executive branch can argue correctly "You can't prove an NSL existed, therefor you can't prove you were harmed by NSLs, therefor you have no reason to sue".

I just wish more of the Senate had understood what was really at stake and followed Sen Russ Feingold's (D-WI) lead. Because what was actually going on was that the executive succeeded in shutting out the judiciary from the judicial process.

The really interesting part about National Security Letters is that they're fairly obviously unconsitutional, but were designed in such a way that the judiciary would never rule on their constitutionality. By making it a crime to reveal that you've received an NSL, you make it impossible for anyone to demonstrate that it existed in the first place, and thus prevent anyone who was targeted by them to establish standing to sue. So if someone tries to challenge it, the executive branch can argue correctly "You can't prove an NSL existed, therefor you can't prove you were harmed by NSLs, therefor you have no reason to sue".

It seems really easy to sidestep this. Take the NSL to a judge, or use it as evidence to sue. If they come after you for revealing the existence of an NSL there is your proof that it has impacted you and you have standing. If the courts rule that states secrets are justified, and that your action was indeed illegal then you are basically in trouble -- you have admitted blatantly violating the law and will probably be imprisoned. But if you should win and you can have it ruled the law was unconstitutional th

If you get 1000 requests a month from various law enforcement agencies across the country, that's an awful lot of man hours to dedicate to these requests. If you have a fee in place to cover costs in the first place, it ensures that a surge in requests doesn't drain the budget of the department in charge of sorting them out.

It's not that Yahoo occasionally complies with the authorities. It is that they have a pricing scheme for it.

Think that one through. If there were no price list posted for the information, then any fool in a bureaucracy can request it and get it. However, government bureaus being what they are, if you put so much as a $50 price tag on the information, you may be requiring said bureaucrat to jump through many hoops and have their actions questioned and tracked. This tiny fee will likely annoy them and stop a very large proportion of inquiries.

A friend of mine (a army colonel in Logistics) said that in government, it's often easier to spend a billion dollars than it is to spend fifty.

I salute Yahoo's putting at least a speed-bump in the way. It's something.

According to the U.S. Constitution (I got this from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]), the purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The problem seems to be that the actual legislation covers creative works that were never intended to be shared with the public. Such documents, like the ones in question, are within the scope of copyright law but not the spirit.

But as far as I know, courts have been unwilling to strike down current copyright laws just because they're less than perfectly efficient in achieving the Constitution's justification for them.

A confidential internal memo detailing plans for building a new type of engine could "promote the Progress of Science"; ergo, it deserves copyright protection. It also details trade secrets that could damage the company it belongs to; ergo, it deserves to be treated as confidential. Using this example, I'm having a hard time understanding your complaint.

Confidential trade secrets are meant to handled with care to ensure that copies are tightly controlled and don't leak to unwanted parties.If one such party does obtain sensitive documents or information, apart from being difficult to trace, he needn't even make a physical copy of it to use it unlawfully.And if the copyright on the document make spying or leaking them more severe, it would mean that using them without copying would be a much lighter crime.

like the ones in question, are within the scope of copyright law but not the spirit.

No. This is a list if facts, and as such not copyrightable [wikipedia.org]. Things like phone book numbers, lists of addresses, dates, and price lists (as this is) are not copyrightable. But it also should be remembered that we have the most pro-corporation government in history, and this could change if there was enough congressional interest - as both the Copyright Term Extension Act and the DMCA shows even though there is little or no public benefit in doing so.

The prices and information itself are not copyrightable, but the actual documents and texts are. The same as no-one can sell a photo-copied phone book, copying the documents which were written by Yahoo does violate their copyright.

Make the procedural demand for the plaintiff to show how a copyright on this document would "... promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and seek for the court to find that the document's copyright is not valid. If the court declines to do so, appeal the specific decision itself. This is all typical delay tactics all lawyers are trained to do. IANAL.

That's pretty easy. Works are automatically copyrighted at the time of creation. If you don't disclose the work, then it's both copyrighted and confidential. Did you try putting even two seconds of thought into it before you asked that question? It's not very difficult.

If you read it, you'll see that it's basically an explanation of what information they do and do not have, how their various properties work and what information they store, and how much it will cost an agency to have certain information requests addressed. It doesn't represent some sort of sinister pipeline of information directly from their users' keyboards to the "evil government." If anything it's useful to everyone because it shows exactly what they do and don't save, and it might act as a deterrent for the casual or clueless investigator who watches too much CSI and thinks sending a request off will instantly pinpoint the bad guy by backtracking his DNS through the GPS IP address of his netbook's MAC module or whatever.

What makes it sinister isn't so much what it says, but that it's supposed to be secret in the first place, and the takedown notice now that it has been divulged. I prefer to know what my rights are in the first place, thankyouverymuch. There's this idea that we can't let people know the rules of the game, since bad guys would then exploit them. Admittedly there is some truth to this; look at how corporations freeload by playing games with the tax codes. But what is the alternative? A lawless state where everybody lives with the vague threat of "stay in line or something bad might happen."

... or other confidential markings in this document, I don't feel there is any reason not to public disclose this document all or in part. In fact, I will do that just now...

For email:"Yahoo! retains a user’s incoming mail as long as the user chooses to store such messages in their mail folders andthe user’s email account remains active. Yahoo! retains a user’s sent mail only if the user sets their email accountoptions to save sent mail and has not subsequently deleted specific messages."

For messenger:"For Yahoo! Chat and all forms of Messenger, Yahoo! has log information regarding the use of the services. Yahoo!maintains a “Friends List” for users of Yahoo! Messenger and can determine from its logs the time and date that auser logged into Messenger or Chat (in the prior 45-60 days) and the IP address used. Yahoo! also can retrievefrom its Chat and Messenger logs the names of the chat rooms that the user accessed and the Yahoo! IDs of theother people with whom a user communicated through Messenger during the prior 45-60 days. In order to searchthese logs, a Yahoo! ID and a specific time frame, preferably no more than three days, must be provided."

For flickr:"If provided with a Yahoo! ID, Flickr URL, or Flickr NSID, Yahoo! has the ability to produce subscriber information forthe account-holder. As long as the Flickr account is active, Yahoo! has the ability to produce content in the account– with associated upload IP addresses and date and time – as well as the email and Groups information for theaccount."

For groups:"Yahoo! maintains information about Group moderators, as well as an activity log for each Group. The Group activitylog is a transactional log that indicates when members have subscribed or unsubscribed from the Group, posted ordeleted files or polls, or other similar events. Not all Group activities are logged, however. For example, the readingof messages or downloading of files or photos is not logged.Although the Group Message archive maintains messages sent to Group members, the message archive does notcontain any attachments to the messages. Yahoo! does not maintain those attachments in any form.For current Groups, Yahoo! retains information relating to the moderator, members, and the active contents of theFiles, Photos, and Messages sections. If a Group has been deactivated or deleted, information about the Groupmay be preserved for approximately 30 days, after which the information may be deleted."

For geocities and other premium web services:"For web-hostingand domains, Yahoo! will have basic Yahoo! registration information about the user who posted the page. Yahoo!also will have the active files that the user has uploaded to the website, including the date on which the files wereuploaded, and the domain-based email that is available to the user. Deleted email is not available."

And here is how much it costs:" Basic subscriber records: approx. $20 for the first ID, $10 per ID thereafter
Basic Group Information (including information about moderators): approx. $20 for a group with a
single moderator
Contents of subscriber accounts, including email: approx. $30-$40 per user
Contents of Groups: approx. $40 - $80 per group"

In the US, the people are the final authority on what is right and wrong, Constitutional or not.

In my opinion, Marbury v. Madison was a terrible ruling, and the beginning of the American decline. Without that ruling, it would have been up to the people to police Congress, and the level of apathy we see today would have never been attained.

In my opinion, Marbury v. Madison was a terrible ruling, and the beginning of the American decline. Without that ruling, it would have been up to the people to police Congress, and the level of apathy we see today would have never been attained.

[quote]God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which iswrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit ofresistance

Yes... two centuries of a stable government has provided among the highest standards of living and opportunity, but you'd rather throw that away for a government that gets bloodily overthrown every few years such as the paradises that are Afghanistan... and Somalia... and Haiti.....

You, sir, are a complete moron who has no idea how nice you have it and how bad unstable governments really are.

"The people" wouldn't be apathetic to the political process. I don't know if that would yield a better result or not, but I believe it would.

And yes, it would be bloody. When Americans lost the desire and ability to stand up and put their own lives and fortunes on the line, then we lost what it was to be an American in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. I think that's very sad, as the American system was a grand experiment and a noble cause - certainly not without its problems, but also certainly th

What evidence do you have to support this claim? Because all the historical evidence for thousands of years is that most people can't be bothered with worrying about anything beyond the end of their nose. Why do you think, if given the awesome responsibility of policing Congress and the laws, that the average person would suddenly rise to the occasion? They can't even be bothered to vote out incumbents but you think they could override lobbyists and multi-thousand page laws?

A company is incapable of feeling shame (which is why so many behave so shamefully), but can recognize that people feeling that they SHOULD feel shame can damage that profitability.

Unfortunately, by not actually feeling shame, corporations (unlike most people) can entirely avoid the many negative consequences of shameful behavior if they can keep it secret. As that can be quite profitable, they naturally prefer secrecy over doing the right thing. The one saving grace is that occasionally their secrets get d

I think everyone here is very much missing the point: They are providing these pieces of information in response to lawful orders like subpoenas. They do not have the ability to say no to those, it is illegal and they would get in trouble. So why the price sheet? Because the law does not require that third parties spend money to cooperate with the police. You can bill them for the costs incurred. Hence, for large companies that get requests all the time, having a price sheet makes sense. That way there's no

I don't blame them for charging, I certainly don't expect them to do it for free.

They are legally required to respond with whatever records they have, but nothing says they have to keep those records at all. They are free to retain them only as aggregate stats, toss them within 24 hours, or even send them directly to/dev/null.

I don't expect the latter, that makes troubleshooting a problem, but why in the world would they keep any information dating to 1999?

In reality, as shame is entirely based on social conditioning, and has no base in biology, the shame is relative to the social mindset//world/group you live in. (Which does not have to be the same as that of the people you have contact with.)

For example: An nudist in a community of nudists, is not ashamed at all. Some are not even ashamed when they are not in that community.And there is no right/wrong about it. It’s all arbitrary

Actually, shame may be in part biological and in part social. The capacity for shame seems to be wired into the brain at some level, but what triggers it varies with our social norms.

Over all, it probably helps humanity be somewhat cohesive as a society. Honestly, most people don't KNOW the law well enough to obey it, they just know what behaviors bring shame and avoid those. This is particularly tied to parenting.

In that context, Yahoo believes that a significant portion of their customer base would believ

Who really sends dead tree letters nowadays... for all personal purposes e-mail is the new letter medium, but it does not have the same protection as postal mail has.
Apparently because e-mails are digital they are legally different and get different legal protection (although people still expect privacy for they peronal e-mail, the law seemingly does not).

Since the law apparently knows the distinction between real-world and digital versions of basically the same thing, why are people still sued to bankru

If a copyright notice is optional, then some means to know whether the document is genuinely copyrighted PRIOR to its dissemination would be needed for others to know that it is in fact copyrighted. It could be that copyrighting the document was overlooked, and has only been corrected after the fact. If they did copyright it prior to dissemination, then there has to be at least something to show this.

Michael Gershberg appears to be claiming, if Cryptome's copy of the letter is accurate, that the document is in fact copyrighted. So how is it that he knows this to be the case? Does he see some instrumental proof that the document is copyrighted? Was he just personally told that the document is copyrighted? He should support his claim by providing a notarized copy of the instrumental proof, or swear out a claim citing who told him that it was copyrighted, in order to be convincing. Otherwise, he is not very convincing at all.

The lack of a copyright notice always gives the APPEARANCE of not being copyrighted. How can anyone know otherwise unless there is some alternative proof. WHERE'S THE PROOF?

It's the law, apparently, at least if you're not a common carrier. From Yahoo's compliance guide,

Federal law (See 18 U.S.C. 2706) requires law enforcement to reimburse providers like Yahoo! for costs incurred responding to subpoena requests, court orders, or search warrants. Yahoo! generally requests reimbursement when responding to legal process, except that Yahoo! maintains an exception to this policy for cases involving the abduction or exploitation of children.

The law is available here [cornell.edu]. It's a requirement for law enforcement requesting information, not the organizations providing it (except that the amount is "mutually agreed by the governmental entity and the person or entity providing the information").

A governmental entity obtaining the contents of communications, records, or other information under section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information. Such reimbursable costs shall include any costs due to necessary disruption of normal operations of any electronic communication service or remote computing service in which such information may be stored.

So, the guide is a means for law enforcement to interact with Yahoo (and the law) in a standard, easier way. Does it make it more likely that investigators would ask Yahoo for documents if Yahoo makes it easy, as opposed to cooperating as little as possible? Probably. But Yahoo has no reason not to cooperate.

most people use Dynamic IPs, so they can subpoena the IPs but they will get a lot of "false positives" to track down the owner of those Yahoo IDs. Most people do not have the same ISP they had in 1999 due to the great dial-up to broadband rush after the Dotcom bubble burst. You'll have grandmothers and teenagers be accused of stuff that some random stranger that shared a dynamic IP address with them did.

Thanks to the Patriot Act, the police, NSA, FBI etc can get the information without a search warrant. The Democrats lead by Obama had promised to remove the Patriot Act as soon as they took office, but why it is still a law, I'll never know. But then many of them voted to pass it when Bush was President anyway. Both the Democrats and Republicans are corrupt in that way.

By the way Yahoo uses web beacons to track web site usage and most users don't know how to opt out of that. I've opted out of it several times already.

While watching a presentation by a Google engineering exec a few months ago, I got the impression that selling information about Google users was at the core of Google's strategic vision. Maybe I was extrapolating too far from limited data. I'm cautiously favorable about Google as a company, and "don't be evil" is just the mindset that's needed for a company that has that much power. But nearly every institution, cultlike, has the denial of its worst evil built into its expressed ideology. Microsoft is

While watching a presentation by a Google engineering exec a few months ago, I got the impression that selling information about Google users was at the core of Google's strategic vision. Maybe I was extrapolating too far from limited data. I'm cautiously favorable about Google as a company, and "don't be evil" is just the mindset that's needed for a company that has that much power. But nearly every institution, cultlike, has the denial of its worst evil built into its expressed ideology. Microsoft is all about innovation, authoritarian governments all call themselves "democratic republics", etc. Google seems to have the potential to go either way.

Yes I realize that the main discussion is about Yahoo, but I think Google is more important, since they're a better company.

Maybe I should clarify by saying that the information that was being discussed was statistical in nature, not information on specific individuals.

So, if there's a law that requires ISPs and the like of turning over data to government on request, is there also a law that prevents such service providers of informing a user that some of their personal information has been released and to whom?